Anthony Grey

by Peking- A Novel of China's Revolution- 1921-1978 (epub)

  “Are you Miss Abigail Kellner?” asked the old woman tentatively in Chinese before they could speak.

  “Yes,” said Abigail. “Did you send the note asking me to come?” The woman nodded slowly. “I am Chen Ming’s amah. I’ve been caring for him since the earthquake.” As she spoke Ming appeared at her side and clutched her hand. The old amah looked down at him and Abigail saw tears well up in her tired eyes.

  “He doesn’t understand . . . his father and his grand.. mother . . . there was a terrible accident.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard.” Abigail dropped to her knees and gently took the boy’s hand in hers. “Hello, Ming. I once sent you a panda. Did you like it?”

  Ming stared blankly back at her without answering; then, abruptly, he tugged his hand free and turned and ran back into the house. When Abigail stood up again, silent tears were streaming down the shriveled cheeks of the amah, and Abigail saw that she was holding an envelope toward her in a shaking hand.

  “This is for you — from Kao. It arrived after he died. He sent a note asking me to call you here.”

  Abigail glanced around at Jakob before tearing open the envelope. Because of the gathering darkness she had to move toward the light of the street lamp to decipher the few lines of Chinese characters that had been written, seemingly with haste, on a single sheet of paper. When she had finished, she turned and handed the note wordlessly to Jakob. It read:

  Dear Abigail,

  Please, will you care for Ming? The revolution and I have both failed him. Look after him here or take him to live with you and my father in Hong Kong, whichever you wish. My father, I’ve realized, is a good man. Please educate and bring up Ming between you as you both think fit. If it’s wise, let him return to China sometime in the future. I know that I have greatly dishonored my mother and my true father. I’m deeply ashamed.

  Thank you.

  Kao

  When he lifted his eyes from the letter, Jakob found the old amah gazing fixedly at them. “I’m too old now,” she whispered. “Will you take the boy?”

  He saw then that Ming had returned to the doorway with the toy panda Abigail had bought for him hanging from his hand. Grime and dust had discolored its fur and it was obvious that the toy too had been buried in the earthquake rubble. The boy was looking up at them, his dark eyes unblinking, and Jakob bent quickly to take him up in his arms.

  “A long time ago, Kao’s mother saved my daughter’s life,” he said quietly to the old amah. “So we would be more than happy to have the chance to care for Ming.”

  Turning to look at Abigail, he slipped an arm around her shoulders. “Do you agree?”

  Although Abigail was smiling at him, tears appeared suddenly in her eyes. “Of course. I’m sure it’s the right thing to do.”

  Epilogue

  1978

  From his seat at the table around which the reorganized Politburo of the Communist Party of China was gathered in the Great Hall of the People, Marshal Lu Chiao could see through the windows the new multi-pillared mausoleum of granite and marble that now dominated the Square of Heavenly Peace. A massive rectangular neoclassic structure, it covered an area the size of a small sports stadium in the heart of the square, but none of the Politburo members listening to an address by the squat, determined-looking Szechuanese who had recently been restored to his post as general secretary of the Party spared the new structure a glance.

  Inside the mausoleum’s lofty central chamber, the embalmed body of Mao Tse-tung lay on display in a flood-lit crystal casket; partially draped in a red flag, the body always looked to Chiao like a waxen effigy that had never enjoyed the fullness of life. The shrine had already become a place of national pilgrimage, but the millions of Chinese who had filed through the mausoleum since it was opened nine months earlier often emerged, Chiao had noticed, looking bemused rather than inspired. Those who had suffered during the last two decades of torment that the dead man had inflicted on the country clearly found it difficult to appreciate the first thirty years of his leadership, when he had ingeniously conjured peasant armies out of nothing and led them to impossible victories that had sparked the most profound change in the nation’s history.

  “Reform is the key to solving China’s many problems now,” the Szechuanese was saying, speaking in the blunt manner with which all the men around the table had been familiar off and on for many years. “Class struggle has had its day. Now it must take a backseat

  Chiao watched Teng Hsiao-ping closely as he spoke. He had been curious to know whether the man who had been purged twice from the Party’s highest ranks and come back successfully three times had suffered any loss of appetite for the grueling political task of governing a nation of nine hundred million people. Little more than five feet in height, with a broad, peasant face that in his early seventies still looked as tough as old leather, Teng seemed as though he had been strengthened by his periods of exile Although Hua Kuo-feng remained nominally chairman and head of the Party, both men knew well enough who had the whip hand, and it was evident from his demeanor that the stocky, quick-striding Szechuanese who had served as a political commissar to the Red Cadres Regiment on the Long March had lost none of his zest for life’s battle.

  “Now before we do anything else we must bring the people some prosperity,” continued Teng, his jaw jutting pugnaciously as he spoke. “A start must be made straightaway by reorganizing our agriculture and returning to a family system of farming. Urban industry and commerce will also need to be reformed. But we must proceed cautiously and carefully. Our ignorance, poverty, and backwardness all stem from China’s isolation. We must open our minds to the outside world. . .

  Around the table there was no sign of the widow of Mao Tse-tung or any of her supporters, to whom Teng’s words would have been anathema. The Gang of Four were languishing in separate cells in a military prison a few miles from the Great Hall. For two years they had been undergoing constant interrogations by hard-eyed cadres who were preparing documents for a public criminal trial. The early top-secret drafts of the indictments that had passed across Chiao’s desk had showed that the Gang of Four were likely to be accused of a series of crimes that laid responsibility at their door for more than thirty thousand political murders during the Cultural Revolution. Other documents Chiao had seen gave details of the persecution inflicted on nearly three quarters of a million people, and it seemed certain that supporters of the late Marshal Lin Piao, who had died mysteriously in 1971 were also to be tried alongside the Gang. The death penalty, the documents indicated, was likely to be called for in the case of all the ringleaders.

  “All this,” said Teng, lighting one of the many cigarettes he smoked each day, “will require the untiring efforts of several generations if China is to become a civilized, democratic, and modern socialist country. Above all, our policies must be determined by a crystallization of collective wisdom, not by any one individual. . .

  Teng drew hard on his cigarette and turned to gaze reflectively at the stone mausoleum that glowed in the summer sunshine beyond the windows.

  “Although we’ve built a splendid memorial to China’s revolution out there, it’s my view that any form of ‘personality cult’ among leaders of the Party should be outlawed from now on. We must put realism at the center of our thinking.”

  Several other Politburo members turned to follow the general secretary’s gaze but Chiao continued to watch Teng. Clouds of smoke billowed around his shoulders as he drew with relish on his cigarette, sitting at ease in his chair. There was something reassuringly earthbound about the diminutive Szechuanese, Chiao reflected. He seemed careless of his own dignity and apparently lacked all conceit. His famous aphorism that it didn’t matter whether a cat were white or black so long as it caught mice summed up his open-minded approach to problems of every stripe. It was as easy to discuss with him the ancient and abstruse tenets of Taoism as it was to argue about modern Marxist theory, and Chiao had never encountered any rigid dogmatism in his thinking. Although it
was not customary to discuss such matters, Chiao found it easy to imagine that, like himself, Teng might have drawn deeply from the well of China’s ancient traditions in surviving ten harsh and debilitating years of political exile. He would, Chiao knew, dismiss any inquiry about such questions with an unfathomable quip; but there was something in his calm, unruffled demeanor which suggested that he was a man at peace with his inner self.

  The dazzling sunshine in the square beyond the windows and the rare feeling of ease among those around the table was creating an almost drowsy sense of well-being in Chiao, and as he listened his thoughts drifted gently backward in time like a breeze-borne butterfly, lighting here and there on disconnected images of the past. He remembered his father adjusting his young limbs in the correct Taoist posture for meditation as they sat side by side at twilight under a tree in their southern courtyard. A caged songbird had trilled sweetly above their heads in the growing dusk when for the first time he felt his body become as light as a leaf. It was in that moment that he had first known himself, and the memory induced in him a deep sense of gratitude to his long-dead father: the ancient wisdom passed down to him had enabled him to cling tenaciously to life and principle during his direst hours. Paradoxically, in the next instant he remembered too the agony of watching his father close the barred door for the last time on his magnificent array of antique bronze, 3adc, and porcelain. But the sadness of that recollection gave way in turn to a feeling of pleasure as he saw again in his mind’s eye the slender-necked Tang ewer that he had taken reverently in his hands on that last evening in the small museum, Its narrow spout had been fashioned in the shape of a phoenix, and he remembered the passion that had seized him as he held it out, telling his father how he yearned for China to rise, phoenix like, from the ashes of its turmoil. Nearly fifty years had passed since then, but as Chiao listened to Teng’s brusque, uncomplicated discourse a feeling that had recently been growing in him became an intuitive certainty: after much suffering, a long, terrible night was ending. A new’ China was at last rising from the old; many great difficulties still lay ahead, but a new dawn, he was sure, was beginning to break.

  Postscript

  A dawn on Easter Sunday, 1936, Alfred Bosshardt, to whom this novel is affectionately dedicated, was released from captivity by China’s Red Army, near Kunming, in Yunnan province. He had trudged 2,500 miles as a prisoner of General Ho Lung’s Second Front Army on the Long March. I was privileged to meet him for the first time in Manchester, England, in 1983 as I began to research the historical background to my story. A largely unsung hero, still living in Manchester in his ninety-first year, Alfred Bosshardt is the only surviving Westerner with firsthand experience of the Long March, and recollections that he has shared with me during numerous meetings in England and Switzerland provided many invaluable insights and much inspiration. Without his help, Peking could scarcely have been written in this form. A step-by-step account of his astonishing survival, dictated from his sickbed in Kunming, was published by his missionary organization in 1936 under the title The Restraining Hand. An abridged version of this can be found in a wider autobiography, published by Hodder and Stoughton in England in 1973, entitled The Guiding Hand. Both books are a moving testament to the faith that helped him survive. For his generosity and his friendship I owe Alfred Bosshardt a very special debt of gratitude.

  I am also much indebted to Mr. Ray Smith of Wheaton, Illinois, whose late father, the Reverend Howard Smith, was serving as a pioneer missionary in western China in the year the Long March began. Howard Smith was taken prisoner in Szechuan — also by Ho Lung’s Second Front Army — in May 1934 and was marched more than eight hundred miles in fifty-two days before making a dramatic escape. Ray Smith, then a very young child, and his mother were also captives for a few hours, and private accounts of these experiences, in addition to letters and photographs that Ray Smith was kind enough to show me provided another wonderfully clear perspective through history’s murky haze.

  Two other courageous American missionaries, a young married couple, were captured and tragically beheaded by Communist troops in Anhwei province in December 1934. An account of their ordeal is given in The Triumph of John and Betty Stam, by Mrs. Howard Taylor, published in Philadelphia in 1935. Their very young baby miraculously survived the ordeal, and echoes of this and other real experiences reverberate in my imaginary story. But none of the fictional characters in Peking, it should be emphasized, is meant to portray or represent any living person. In this connection I should also add that nobody should expect to find any sign of Chentai, Paoshan, or Sanmo on genuine maps of China — at least not in the places I have indicated. All three of these settlements are make-believe and exclusive to this story.

  No book, I suspect, is ever entirely the work of one single individual, and my sincere thanks are due to several friends and specialists in the China field who offered vital encouragement and assistance with the writing of this novel. Sinologist Roderick MacFarquhar, former neighbor in London, onetime broadcasting colleague, and now professor of government and director of the John King Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University, helped enormously by providing essential historical pointers and scouring his extensive private library for Long March memorabilia at the outset to get me launched on my lengthy narrative trek. Dick Wilson, former editor of The China Quarterly and author of many outstanding books on the Far East — including The Long March 1935 — kindly made essential volumes available to me from his personal library. Broadcaster Joseph Hang-tai Yen was equally generous with precious books and time given to translating Chinese documents; Dr. Jung Chang, author of Madame Sun Yat-sen, illuminated early drafts with perspicacious comments; and Brian and Alison Senior willingly contributed their considerable background knowledge of Hong Kong. Also, Madame Nien Cheng, the brave author of Life and Death in Shanghai, which describes her own terrifying Cultural Revolution ordeal, helped personally to put that great city in perspective for mc during the chaos of the late I9óos, and I salute and thank her most warmly.

  In London, librarians at the School of Oriental and African Studies, the Royal Institute of International Affairs (and especially the staff of the institute’s Press Cuttings Library>, the British Library, and the London Library unfailingly rendered patient and painstaking help. Much essential material on the Long March (which, when it is out of print, is not always easy to obtain) emanates from the Foreign Languages Press, Peking. Among such publications are: Stories of the Long March (1960), which I first read during an enforced stay in Peking; The Long March — Eyewitness Accounts (1963); On the Long March with Chairman Mao by Chen Chang-feng (1972); Recalling the Long March by Liu Po-cheng and Others (1978); and On the Long March As Guard to Chou En-lai by Wei Kuo-lu (1978). Otto Braun, the luckless German Comintern adviser sent to China by Moscow, added a polemical dimension to the story by publishing A Comintern Agent in China 1932—1939, which contains some unique detail, and III 1985 Harrison E. Salisbury threw significant new light on the epic Communist migration after retracing much of the route personally. His book The Long March — The Untold Story includes many riveting interviews with aging Long March veterans — but all these publications provided important color and detail of a fascinating historical episode.

  Trying to draw an orderly line through the disorder of China’s revolution over the past seventy years or so is not easy: among the great lexicon of China books that helped mc do this, Ross Terrill’s perspicacious biography Mao stood out. Jonathan Spence’s Gate of Heavenly Peace, which deals with the experiences of intellectuals during China’s early revolutionary upheavals, also contains unique insights. Agnes Smedley’s splendid biography of Chu Teh — The Great Road— and her descriptions of 1930S China in such volumes as Chinese Destinies and Portraits of Chinese Women in Revolution give invaluable firsthand impressions, which bring the period brilliantly to life. Robert Payne’s books, particularly Journey to Red China, China Awake, and A Rage for China, also convey singular glimpses of Chin
a’s revolutionary leaders. Similarly, Edgar Snow’s writings, especially his classic Red Star Over China, along with Nym Wales’s vivid Yenan biographies of the men and women who led the revolution — Red Dust — are seminal reading for anyone wishing to understand the long march to power of Communism in China. Three other books — Paul A. Cohen’s China and Christianity, Christopher Hibbert’s The Dragon Wakes, and Harry A. Franck’s compendious Roving Through Southern China — were wonderfully informative about China in transition from imperial to modern times. For more recent events, Rod MacFarquhar’s three-volume work, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, details the slow-burning development of the cataclysm with unmatched authority.

  In another dimension, an indefatigable but ever-youthful veteran of many long literary campaigns, my Boston editor, William D. Phillips, made as great a contribution to this novel as he did to Sagen — which was very considerable indeed; in London, Victoria Petrie-Hay also gave sustained and valuable editorial assistance. Susan Stewart typed and word-processed the last of three books for me with typical speed and efficiency before going off to become Susan Poulson — she is already greatly missed; Brian McVay and Kenneth Brown provided research assistance that turned out to be vital, as did Simon and Liz Woodside; and others who gave generously of their time and expertise include Ged Lavery, Senator the Reverend Peter Manton of Jersey, Christopher Manton, and Chinese friends Sun Shyi-ren, Tseng Yung-kwang, Yang Sy-kung, and Wang Chihfa. I’m indebted in different ways also to staunch friends Vergil Berger, Ian Macdowall, Kim Davenport, David Alexander, Bob Wareham, and Geoffrey Smyth. In Peking I learned important lessons about the kinder side of human nature — which I hope are reflected in some ways in these pages — from “Hsiao” Kao, “Lao” Chiao (since deceased), “Lao” Wang, and Mrs. Hou. I take this belated opportunity to express my thanks with all sincerity. The nearest and dearest of my helpmates, Shirley Grey, again played a central and indispensable role in bringing this book to fruition, reading, advising, evaluating, and encouraging at every step taken through successive drafts of the six-thousand-mile manuscript.